December 1941 (43 page)

At the end of 1941, just when—for the first time since 1929, unemployment had dipped below 10 percent,
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when war seemed a faraway proposition and when America had two oceans to protect her—an unwanted war had overrun the country. Now, even the White House was undergoing evening blackouts, and plans were made to move the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution from display in the Library of Congress to a secure location in Maryland. The documents creating the very foundation of the government were put in hiding, as officials feared their destruction by bombs or saboteurs.
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Hiding one's government was not cheery news. Mrs. Roosevelt hated the wartime precautions utilized in the White House, especially the long and dour blackout drapes.
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Apartment buildings on the East and West Coast were organizing their basements as bomb shelters, complete with stocked food and toys for children. The Seventh Wonder of the Modern World, the Panama Canal, was closed each evening.
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Preparations were going forward for the construction of bomb shelters in the greater Los Angeles area. One proposal was for shelters to be no more than 300 feet apart from each other.
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Yet another air-raid warning struck terror into Southern California. At night, unidentified planes flew over the entire coast was blacked out, and radio stations went off the air after announcing the raid. “Anti-aircraft and machine gunners scrambled to their weapons at Ft. MacArthur, which was promptly placed on an ‘alert' basis.”
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The planes went unidentified and no bombs fell.
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During the state-wide blackout, car accidents were reported, and several drivers were killed as a result. Airplanes headed for Los Angeles were diverted to other cities, as the radio beam at the airport had been turned off. The fact that a noisy electrical storm happened along at precisely the wrong time did not help Southern Californians' jittery nerves.
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New York had experienced three false air-raid warnings in just a couple of days, including one during rush hour on the morning of the tenth.
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The city was still trying to clean up the mess and the confusion, even as hotels in the five boroughs were making their own plans for air raids.
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Across the country, Americans were asked to stay off the telephone line, so as to not tax the phone system. Far more stringent sacrifices and huge mistakes would follow shortly. Government officials in New England sheepishly announced that they had frankly botched the faux air-raid alert of several days earlier.
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Citizen confidence in government was waning in some quarters.

The news of the war and the incompetence of America would get worse, much worse, before it got better.

CHAPTER 12
THE TWELFTH OF DECEMBER

Army Death List from Hawaii
Reaches 155, Still Incomplete

The Evening Star

Knox in Honolulu

The Atlanta Constitution

Plan Bared for Mobilizing Men, Women

The Boston Daily Globe

T
hese early days of the war were among the very worst. As of the twelfth, Wake Island was still holding on—but just barely—and in a press conference, FDR praised the beleaguered marine garrison fighting there. The British conceded that operations were not going well in the Malaya-Thailand sector and that the Japanese “had dented British defense lines in the jungles. . . . Heavy fighting continued.”
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Hong Kong was closer to being occupied by Japanese troops, who were also coming ashore on the Philippine main island of Luzon, where most of the commerce and population were located. The Japanese claimed they had destroyed over two hundred Americans planes, the vast majority still on the ground. Also, “The Japanese attacked Olongapo, 50 miles west of Manila, one of the most important naval installations in the Philippines [and] the province of Batangas and Clark Field, 40 miles north of Manila.”
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Some unconfirmed reports said Japanese pilots were flying their planes into American targets, and Admiral Thomas Hart, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Fleet, said the Japanese inflicted “very great damage. There was a considerable loss of life, more among the civilians in the city of Cavite than among the naval personnel.”
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Whereas General MacArthur was confident, Hart could only muster a languid, “We shall do our best” statement.
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For his part, Winston Churchill more confidently told Parliament, “We are all in this. Not only the British Empire now, but the United States are fighting for life. It would indeed bring shame upon our generation if we did not teach them a lesson which will not be forgotten in the records of 1000 years.”
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Churchill for his part had been jubilant about the Japanese attack on America. “Churchill regarded the Japanese attack as Britain's salvation. He recalled in his memoirs the emotion he felt at hearing the news: ‘We had won the
war . . .
”
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The night of the seventh, he was having a depressing dinner with Averill Harriman and American ambassador John Winant. A butler brought in a small radio, and Churchill fiddled with the dials, finally getting it turned on. When he heard the report, Churchill immediately called FDR via the transatlantic line. “What's this about Japan?” Roosevelt confirmed that Japan and America were now at war: ‘We are all in the same boat now,” FDR told the British prime minister.
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As of the twelfth, the Russians had still not decided if they would declare war on Japan. Joseph Stalin was locked in a fight to the death with Germany along a 1,800-mile front and was terrified that if he declared war on the Japanese, they would invade Siberia, opening a two-front war. The German offensive, Operation Barbarossa, involved 4.5 million German soldiers,
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and Russia needed all the men they had in uniform to stave off the assault. Russia could barely muster the forces to withstand the German invasion, so it was open to question whether Russia could even send troops to meet the Japanese. As of December 1941, the outcome of the German offensive was still uncertain, and the smart money was on Hitler's army. However, it did appear as if Germany had slowed for the winter, unable to continue its assault because of the brutal Russian cold. But the army of the Third Reich remained in place, hunkered down, with Moscow still in sight.

Out of the midst of the war gloom was some somberly and disquietingly good news with the announcement of the first American hero of the “New War.”
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Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr. had been the pilot of the plane that had sunk the Japanese battleship
Haruna
, and his name had been released for radio and newspaper reports. Kelly's type of aircraft was unidentified in news reports as was the cause of his death, but it was made known he had scored “three direct hits on the Japanese capital ship.”
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Kelly's tragic heroics were a bit of good news in the morass of the unremitting bad reports and bulletins going around in America. But in this, the first naval battle between America's forces and the Japanese, other ships had slipped away, avoiding greater losses for the enemy. In addition to everything else, luck seemed to be on Tokyo's side.

Another little bit of heroic news was the report of the Pan Am Clipper that had escaped Guam, shot up by the imperial navy, but had managed to limp back to San Francisco with the passengers—all employees of the airline who had been stationed on the island—safe and unharmed. It was a story of great courage involving the pilot, who had to engage in some fancy flying to escape the war zone. Left behind at Guam were hundreds of civilians, though, as well as a handful of U.S Marines.
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Interestingly, commercial flights by Pan Am continued in the Pacific, although along new routes and with new passengers: military men. “No commercial passengers or private materials are accepted for the time being on the Pacific,” the air service company said, although flights for private citizens would continue along the east and west coasts of the United States.
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The sad realization of another world war was beginning to settle in. Americans were stoic and resolved though, even as they were facing the unknown. President Roosevelt proclaimed, “The eleventh of December, 1941, will be recorded in history as the date marking the formal beginning of the Great War to preserve this world as a living space for free men. For Americans, there is a certain measure of comfort to be derived from the fact that we are formally at war . . . At long last we know where we stand and we know what has to be done.”
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Before the eleventh, America had only been at war with Japan, and it was still a matter of consternation for many Americans whether their country should get into the European war. The surprise declaration of war by Germany and Italy committed America to a wholly different kind of war, a completely “undiscovered country” of death and destruction.

Only days into the new world war, very few in America really knew yet what would have to be done, the sacrifices that would have to be made, the carnage and slaughter of millions of civilians by the Axis Powers, the untold millions of deaths of young men in uniform on both sides, and how this war would change the world—and their nation—for all time.

America's fighting men had already died in wartime since the attack on the seventh, and many more would die in the days, months, and years ahead in war zones around the world; but thousands of fighting men also died in accidents right here in America, and not a day went by that did not include bulletins of military airplanes crashing in Norfolk, Miami, and Texas, or accidental drownings or accidental shootings in and around the other hundreds of military installations. So many domestic military plane crashes occurred that guidelines were issued instructing civilians on how to help downed pilots escape from the craft and their harnesses. The sacrifice of these service men who were stateside was no less than those of their brothers in harm's way across the rest of the world.

Everybody was coming to understand the rationale behind the Japanese attacks. It was not insanity. The scheme was a blending of their own philosophy of attack first then declare war later. The goal, by utilizing the Nazi blitzkrieg—lightning war—had been a quick decapitation of the American military in the Far East with the hope that Washington, left virtually defenseless to an invasion of the West Coast, would sue for peace. Then the empire of Japan would have the entire western Pacific to itself, with its weak governments and rich natural resources.

Some Americans were also coming to recognize that the arrogance and braggadocio of the American Navy before December 7—that the U.S. Navy was superior to that of the Japanese—had been a myth. “The sea power of the United States and the sea power of Britain were inferior to Japanese sea power in the Pacific last week; they are still inferior, though even more so, today.”
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The fact that many ships in the spring of 1941 had been repositioned to the Atlantic had further weakened the American naval presence in the Pacific. “The attack on Hawaii was a serious military defeat, bordering on a disaster. For a nation of less strength, it might have been an irretrievable disaster. This blunt fact cannot be concealed, even though full details have not been made, public, for obvious military reasons.”
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It had been five days since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Americans still had few hard details of the attack, but they had heard rumors of additional attacks there. No photographs of the aftermath appeared in the nation's publications.

Other than the names of the battleships
West Virginia
and
Oklahoma
, which had appeared in early stories, no subsequent bulletin contained any details about the damage done at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. “There probably is good reason for suppressing temporarily the Pearl Harbor statistics, since the Japanese can only guess at what damage they did—until they have time to hear from their spy system in the islands. But the whole story should be told reasonably soon,” opined the
Los Angeles Times
.
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After being picked up in the shark-infested waters of the China Sea, war correspondent Cecil Brown filed a harrowing story of the head-shaking loss of the British ship
Repulse
.
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“In [a] float, a young midshipman, with a hole in his side big enough to put a fist in sat silently, clenching his teeth. Some men had the skin scalded from their backs, but made no complaint.”
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Japanese planes had first set the ship aflame, and then, like sharks smelling blood in the water, more planes swooped down. The ease with which the Japanese had sunk the giant battlewagon only added to the sense of vulnerability all Americans felt. Allies were also taken aback at the ferocity at which the enemy soldier waged war. Japanese society, with its emphasis on consensus, had subsumed the needs of the individual. Dying for the greater good of the group was honorable. This social value was the product of centuries of feudal warfare; after a long tradition of devastating civil war and the Way of the Shogun, the small and crowded island nation of Japan had learned to survive by placing great value on social peace and the sublimation of egoism. “They die with the same fervor in battle as the Mohammedan. . . . This national characteristic of the Japs may prove a great factor in the Pacific fight,” said an expert on the Far East to a group of businessmen in Alabama.
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